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History of Klene A man named Johannes Klene moves from Amsterdam to Rotterdam in the year 1866. Ten years later he mainly starts making hard candy such as peppermint. Later on he also produces chocolates, licorice, merinques and more and does great business with them. Known is that his profits in the year 1899 were 2031 guilders. In 1903 his company moves to another location in the Bierstraat. His son named Frederik starts working for the company in 1911. He persuades his father to start working with new technologies such as telephone to increase sales. The role of his son becomes more and more important in the business and when his father dies at an age of 72, he takes over the company. After he restructured the company and also moved it to a new location, business improves. Klene is the first of the world that comes with candy packed in rolls, they were named Frujetta's. When the war started it as very hard for Klene to keep production going. Exporting the products was impossible and getting the ingredients to produce was basically undoable. Nevertheless Klene survives and when the war is over production gets started up again. In the following years the employees were supposed to work very hard. Even on normally free Saturdays. If at that day the inspection showed up, people had to hide or they were bribed with licorice. Another notable fact that the company had a gumballmachine at the exit. It was filled with marbles. Who pulled a red marble has to empty his pockets. If you had stolen licorice, you were fired. In the year 1986 Klene decides to leave Amsterdam after nearly being there for 70 years. They move to Hoorn where they still are today. When Johannes Klene started in 1876 he possibly dreamt of having an even bigger company, but he couldn't have known that 125 years later his name is still to be found on many bags of licorice. |
